…In this movie, we are going to take a flat…artwork and convert it to a shape layer, and this will…help us to divide the shape, to separate shapes inside After Effects,…and also create nice, reveal animation for our monkey head.…I'm inside Monkey Head Animation 1, and I'm going to take this…monkey.ai artwork, which we already saw in the previous chapter,…and then just drag it on top of the make new composition button over here.…

This will create a new composition from this…document keeping the same dimensions of the art work.…Now, I'm just going to do some…housekeeping by returning to the project panel.…Press Return.…And then name this composition number two monkey head.…And then I'm going to drag it outside of the…artwork folder and place it inside our begin comps folder.…So this will be our beginning stage.…

Now I know that I need 2 seconds, so I just want to verify under the…composition settings that indeed the duration is set to two seconds.…When you create new compositions from still frames like…we did now, after effects will take the previous settings.…

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4/2/2014

There are some big advantages to using shape layers in After Effects: precise, fast rendering; compatibility with Illustrator; and smaller file sizes. Their vector quality means the artwork can be scaled to any size while remaining crisp and sharp. And they work with third-party effects and support layer styles. Take a deep dive and explore how to use the shape tools to communicate ideas in an uncluttered way and make complex animations simple. Eran Stern shows how to create custom wipe animations, use mathematical operations to animate shapes and paint them in over time, and morph between vector shapes.